


shattered surface, so imperfect

by pendules



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-25
Updated: 2011-07-25
Packaged: 2017-10-21 17:58:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/228009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendules/pseuds/pendules
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first five times. <i>It's not making love. It's leaving proof, on bed sheets and skin that gets healed much too quickly with a kiss, that love was always there.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	shattered surface, so imperfect

i.

The first time it happens, it almost feels like an accident. There's no build-up to it, no acknowledgement of eyes or touch or thought, no words said, no confession of things known and altogether unknown. Just a brush of lips that feels like a mishap – something childish and clumsy – something braver than either of you think you're capable of.

It's feather-light, but so earnest. It only last a second. (It reminds Dean – not awkwardly – of that last kiss with Anna, but this is nothing like a goodbye – this is the opposite of that.) This is a taste, a sample, a graze of fingertips breaking the water's surface before you step in. This is a promise of things to come – a promise to give Dean everything he has and is – all that wonder and greatness, the entire world that he's seen every inch of, all the thousands and thousands of years he's spent here – a promise that it was all Dean's anyway. It always has been; he just has to take it.

Cas disappears with his lips still pressed to Dean's, and it's like nothing he's ever felt – that sudden absence. That change from him being everything Dean could sense to nothing at all. That feeling of a lover slipping through cupped hands like water.

It's then he realises that Cas is eternally slipping away from him, from earth, from everything real and solid and alive, everything he's ever valued. This is what he hates and fears the most. He thinks he's always doomed to want things he'll never have, and to be ashamed of wanting them at all.

Cas, Cas wants to give all of himself to Dean, but he doesn't know what that means. Dean thinks he would, he would love Cas as much as Cas loves him, but there are so many parts of him that are unknown to him, parts he couldn't show him if they had a million years.

It's braver than anything they've spoken to each other – that kiss. For once, Dean keeps his eyes open, and Cas's eyes are, so rarely, shut.

 

v.

It's patient and so careful when it happens. It feels like falling asleep, or maybe waking up – waking up into each other.

Dean reaches for his tie, but he stops him with his own hands, so gently. He loosens it himself, slips it over his head. But he lets Dean slowly unbutton his shirt, feels the slide of his warm, worn hands against his chest, as if cherishing the humanity he doesn't have.

 

There's nothing Castiel loves more than Dean Winchester's mind.

He remembers the morning he'd stood in his favourite heaven, looking up at the kite bobbing in the blue, blue sky, and thought, _I am in love._

He's relived someone else's life over and over again until it feels like his own – until it feels like a memory, fractured and diluted and faded, like an old photograph lost in an attic.

But Castiel doesn't forget a lot of things. He makes himself forget things about Dean though, so he can keep relearning them.

He wonders if that's what love is, if it can ever be solidified into an action, into something tangible and identifiable, something done time and time again to show as evidence that love exists here.

 

Dean says after, _I'm glad you know me_ , and maybe he's responding to an unfinished conversation or a dream that was stolen away too early. Castiel can't quite remember.

(And maybe this is the action, the repeated action, the one without words and without explanation, like you can read each other's minds in your bodies.

It's not making love. It's leaving proof, on bed sheets and skin that gets healed much too quickly with a kiss, that love was always there.)

 _I've always known you._

And it's a lie. He didn't know anything about the man he'd pulled out of hell. Dean didn't know anything about himself either. There's a midpoint between discovery and creation where they meet.

 

ii.

Maybe he means to say _Thank you_ or _Be safe_ or _Please stay_.

Castiel knows all of this, but the fact that he doesn't say it means more.

The second one comes after, _Wait_.

Castiel turns back to him, and he pulls him in, still so gently, but it's more of a deliberate collision this time. Castiel exhales and his lips part, fitting them together. He rests his borrowed fingertips on Dean's face, a face his memory has traced and retraced – and perfected and shattered, but never changed.

 

You can rebuild every part of him and of the world, but you'd choose the latter – again and again and again.

You have chosen.

You think he's rebuilt you, brick by brick, with bare hands, rough and scarred and bloody.

He undoes you like souls in the pit.

His mind was calm then too.

You didn't know him at all until you loved him.

But then, you always loved him.

 

iii.

The third time happens against his car which is parked by a lake.

You aren't sure if it's real, if he's dreaming or if he's dead. Maybe it happened twenty years ago, and this is his heaven. Maybe the you it's happening to is not you at all. Maybe you're watching from afar, like you watched his life from afar, like you've always watched him no matter how close you got. Maybe you're mourning. Maybe you've been mourning his death since you met him.

The night's sky is as clear as any has ever been.

You sit on the hood, and he's nursing a beer, and you want to hold his hand until the world ends and everything collapses into nothing. But you don't. You don't touch until you're touching.

His eyes are open, like he doesn't want to miss any of it. It's then you realise time's always been running out.

You don't leave him for a long while. You just stay there with him, his car, the smooth, glassy surface of the water, the moon like some giant, glowing coin in the sky. You can hold it in the palm of your hand, like you can hold him.

 

iv.

It's when you tell him.

You say, It's not that I could have everything; it's that everything doesn't exist anymore.

Everything changes when you refuse to. Don't you see that?

I've changed everything I am so that you won't have to.

Is that what love is?

Is it so selfish?

Is it so –

 

Of course, he doesn't say any of these things.

He says, _I've seen every part of you, every year of your life, and it was more to me than anything else I've ever seen. I can't give you anything you're not ready to accept. I can't give you anything but what I already have._

'A kiss, you mean?'

'Yes, that's all.'

'How long have you been in love with me?'

'As long as you've known.'


End file.
